There is a serious amount of good stuff in 5. I think the biggest hangup atm aside from hooks is the template system. If they can identify its the issue and fix it, 5 could see big improvements.

Vb5 should look what its competitor is doing. I think I like xenforo direction because it feels new and modern using it.Even though the default style is not anyway near to modern. But there are many stuff we feels very nice. Look at its pagination when there are too many pages here . There is an arrow, when you click it animates. These are cool stuff. vb5 just look solid and stiff. no hover effects nor simple animation.

It's stylevar properties is a leap 10 year forward- vbulletin no near to xenforo. Template system is good. Code is very clean. But vb5 template editor has line number feature which is very good.

vbulletin also has to look back at vbulletin.org as main modification place. If you look at xenforo -resources. you can sell stuff too for paid add on - xenforo forum you can do everything. And you don't need to ask people to go somewhere else to get customisation support like vbulletin does. It's like asking someone to leave. There is no good asking mod question here in vbulletin.com go to vbulletin.org instead. Or in vbulletin.org. you cannot advertise or sell product in here you stupid. These all have to go.

If you don't want to buy xenforo to be vb6. Then follow what they are doing to grow their community and software.

The main reason people used to buy vbulletin not because of it was solid, fast and non-buggy. It was the existing of vbuleltin.org, plenty of plugins, templates, for free, to try things and to learn from a friendly community.

Well, nowaday these things are no where to be found :)

vBulletin.org is dead, so does Vbulletin 5 (at least).

Behind Xenforo success is sadly a strong push from vbulletin itself.

People disapointed with the latest release of vbulletin 5, since they were patiently waited like years to have a STABLE release of vbuleltin 4, they expected something outstanding, but we all see what they got, buggy, slow as hell vbulletin 5 and most of the well-know developers never recommend it, well actually they do but it was highly recommend people to AVOID it.

If Xenforo was another good forum software, it would never reach the position it is right now, but since the PR was good, "The former lead developer of vbulletin 4, the developer of vbulletin before it goes mad", people really buy that.

IB (not VB) massively shot themselves in the foot with the seemingly pointless legal action they took.

That gave loads of publicity to XF, and at the same time, made IB the villain everyone hates.

To this day I still dont understand why they did that, it backfired hugely IMO.

This is a myth.

The vast majority of customers never customised their boards at all. Most didn't even bother with a custom style. The same issue is seen with XenForo and IPB, look at how many completely stock sites there are out there.

That's not to say there was no value in vbulletin.org, far from it, and I will always be its greatest advocate and supporter, but the idea that most customers used it is not true at all.

I have to say that after working with various systems, free and otherwise over the years, I am quite impressed with Xenforo. I use it for a non-main interest board I run and it is very smooth, fast, and easy to navigate. The vB admin options and back end took me quite awhile to understand fully, even with the knowledge I had working with free systems before it. If Xenforo had comparable mods to all the things I need there is a good chance my community might be pushing me to switch to it, but since there isn't, we stick with vBulletin. I do hope that the vB team would see what a great product vB4 has become and put more resources into making it even better...(I mean, we all would like that right?)

I see where Mark is coming from. Forums for the most part haven't really evolved over the years in their core functionality. It is difficult to say how they should evolve or what the "new generation" of message board should look like. What I think vBulletin did wrong was decide to try to be innovative with their main product when that is absolutely not what its core customer base wanted. If you want to attempt to see what the "next generation" of forums should be, create a smaller new product that isn't beholden to a current customer base to roll out and test different things, or, here is a thought, create mods for your current project to change its functionality in new ways and see what people think. They put all of their eggs in one basket in this case, betting everything on the new "innovations" they had, and what they ended up with was a less functional, less customizable piece of software from the consumers' standpoints.

I like vB, and for me personally vB.org has been the only saving grace of this software. If it wasn't for the great help and friendly atmosphere I get here I'd have left a long time ago and moved back to free stuff or hopped onto the Xenforo train.

This is true, but the devil's in the details. The minority of people on this site accounted for an obscene amount of direct or indirect referrals (ultimately sales, positioning, and stability) to vBulletin.

IPB would've crushed vBulletin in the absence of vBulletin.org. It's also provided strong momentum to the software. It's also served as a migration backstop due to old modifications. I know many, many admins who won't leave vB due to old mods.

TL;DR, imagine what vBulletin would be and where it would be, without vBulletin.org. This is what I mean by details, and we can still go deeper than that. Nobody who's been around for a while will deny the importance this site held.

As Paul said, IB shot themselves in the foot. They didn't realize that referrals were the #1 source of vBulletin's business, and how vBulletin.org was an integral part of that. vBulletin.org wasn't their only source, but it was both large and multi-dimensional.

And I say IB didn't realize how important vBulletin.org was because of, you know, vB5.

While addons and modifications did help sell the software. For the majority of my 11 years less than 20~% of sites I ever worked on had addons. Most sites barely had the logo changed.

The addons themselves didn't sell vBulletin directly, however kick ass forums running addons, or highly customized did.

This. When people want to set up forums, it's the forums they remember that guide their choice. Sure, 80% (reversing the 20% cited earlier) then discover modding is a bit of work and never do it, but I don't buy a correlation of 'finished product' with 'purchasing choice'.

Sorry to threadsurrect, but I'm at a cross-roads and have been doing some reading to see what the status of vb5 is. I've turned into That Guy who has a house of cards built on dependencies that have become restrictive.

I won't even lie and say that the current state of vb.org isn't a major factor.

What I'd like to see, what no one is getting right, is a great CMS. I use mediawiki heavily, but it's lack of granular permissions is holding me back. Yet, it's ability to template within and embed metadata allows for dynamic and formatted content that forums alone don't support.

Eventually, someone's going to get it right. Either a CMS with robust forum features, or a forum with robust CMS features. Or a full-fledged bridge.

• Wordpress as CMS and/or blog.
• vBulletin 4 as forum.
• Wordpress+vB bridge.
• Done.

vB CMS? Ok, could be better and vB5 perhaps one day, I still haven't decided about that schmuck (referring to vB5 as the... yeah you guessed it :D ).